Tancredo Is "Just Asking" If We Can Still "Segregate" Gay Troops

December 22, 2010 10:50 am ET —
Kate Conway

Last Saturday, someone decided it might be a good idea to give
former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo a three-hour guest hosting slot on
Colorado talk radio station 850 KOA. (Consolation prize for his failed
gubernatorial bid on the Constitution Party ticket?) Tancredo elected to
use most of his allotted time to discuss topics the Senate had recently taken
up (coincidentally, also perhaps his greatest fears): immigrants and gay
people.

Unsurprisingly, Tancredo, who has made his anti-immigrant
views well known, isn't in favor of the DREAM Act (which, he claimed, will give
special affirmative action treatment to tons of people sneaking in from Latin
America and Africa). He was also skeptical about the "political" repeal of "Don't
Ask, Don't Tell," but fortunately for the large majorities of Americans
and military
personnel who wanted DADT to go away, Tancredo isn't in charge; President
Obama signed
repeal into law this morning.

Yet, knowing what was coming, Tancredo clung to hope that
our combat troops might be saved from actually having to serve in close
quarters with those scary gays. "I wonder," he mused, "to what extent this
ruling allows the military to segregate within their own ranks."

TANCREDO: I have a feeling there
may be other problems that develop. Certainly those kinds of things have been
expressed by the head of the — by the common head of the Marine Corps. And I
would — among other things I wonder to
what extent this ruling allows the military to segregate within their own
ranks. That is to say, it's okay, just as we said that it was ok to have
females in the military but we would segregate them into non-combative roles,
then would this be — I wonder if we could do the same thing in this situation,
saying that just the environment in combat does not lend itself to having these
other pressures on the people that we ask to do the fighting. I don't know.
I'm just asking a question. I do not know if that was part of the bill that was
passed today by the Senate, whether it really went into that kind of detail. I
doubt it. Usually these things go over to the military and you know the
military is just simply told, "implement."